[Credit where credit is due] Thanks to John Piliounis (jopil@atlascom.gr) for pointing out a mistake in one of my PCIe diagrams!  First, what's PCI Express?  PCI Express is a standard connector between your motherboard and various PC addons, such as graphics cards and Wi-Fi cards. It's a complex high-performance serial link. It's also very robust … Continue reading A De-Facto PCI Express Standard Emerges →

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_logic People have actually bothered to express things like this in math. I'm impressed. Basically, they broke it down into things like this: "If A and B and C are true, and D and E and F are possible at all then assume G" "Does it have a beak and wings? Do any other things … Continue reading Default Logic →

I just bought a PIC32 Ethernet Starter Kit on eBay. I initially tried to follow this guide to setting up a HTTP server: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyclfQkgLnM  However, I ran into a few issues when I tried to compile the project: The TCP/IP library complained about missing "SHA-256". Easily resolved by adding: MPLAB Harmony Configurator --> MPLAB Harmony … Continue reading Fixing Compile Errors in MPLAB-X Harmony TCP/IP Project →

I recently bought a bunch of FPGA boards on eBay. All out of date stuff: Virtex II Pro, Virtex 4, Virtex 5, etc. I'm really building a collection of boards from Xilinx's history here. The reason they're all Xilinx and not Altera boards is, Xilinx has made license keys for very old versions of their … Continue reading Validation of a CPU Core for FPGA →

While updating the BIOS on an old PC (which I use for running old Windows XP programs), I ran into the issue where the update program, O740-227.exe, would just crash. It worked at first, giving me a warning about removing all USB devices. So I removed all non-essential USB devices, retried the program… and… crash. … Continue reading Updating the BIOS on an Optiplex 740 →

I collect old Macintosh computers. It's fun booting these things up and playing games from my childhood. Games like Lemmings, Harry the Handsome Executive, Escape Velocity, Spaceward Ho!, and of course the famous Marathon. There's just one problem… the mice for these old computers suck.  A rubber ball rolls along your mousepad. It picks up … Continue reading How to Make an Optical Macintosh Mouse for $16 →

First, what's PCI Express?  PCI Express is a standard connector between your motherboard and various PC addons, such as graphics cards and Wi-Fi cards. It's a complex high-performance serial link. It's also very robust and able to handle abuse from consumers building their own PCs. Inside a desktop, they look like this:  And the cards … Continue reading A De-Facto PCI Express Standard Emerges →